World Reports

The ecology of genocide

Sudan's environment

A
caravan of a hundred camels traverses the cracked Saharan plains on a
several-day journey to the nearest water source in North Darfur as I
barrel down the bumpy trail, crammed into the back of a 1960s-model
pickup. Stony hills give way to patches of desert, golden grassy
meadows, and parched fields of sorghum and millet. Villages of circular
huts made of mud and straw are spread thin across the vast, empty
countryside, far enough apart to allow the human population to maintain
its delicate balance with the scarce resources of their fragile
environment.

Conflict in Sudan and its environmental consequences in Chad

Many
of the villages now look like tiny moonscapes of above-ground craters.
The circular mud brick walls of their huts remain standing but their
insides are charred and their straw roofs turned to ash. A thin layer
of soot coats the cracked clay pots and bed frames that lie exposed to
the open sky. Bits of animal bones, scraps of cloth, tin cans, glass,
and rusted lanterns are strewn across the ground among empty bullets
and one-foot-long mortar shells. Many of the villages remain intact,
but they are slowly becoming swept over by sand as they come into their
third year of standing empty, their residents having fled as soon as
they saw the towers of smoke curling up into the clouds while nearby
villages were engulfed in flames.

Separating Sudan’s Darfur
region and Chad is a 30-foot-wide dried river bed that doubles as a
border, but means little for the people living on either side of it.
Like all borders in Africa, this one is a product of colonial
statecraft, with no relevance to preexisting ethnic identities,
linguistic groupings, or communities. Pastoralists move their herds
across this unassuming frontier through the lands of their ethnic kin
in search of fodder and water. The marauding Janjaweed militia cross
into Chad to pillage villages and steal their livestock, while Chadian
and Sudanese rebels skip back and forth depending on who and where
their enemies are at a given time.

USAIDA Darfur village burned by the Janjaweed.

The only people held back by the border are the militaries of either
country, so when the Sudanese government waged its genocidal campaign
against Darfur’s black population, the Masalit, Zaghawa, and other
ethnic groups living near the border came to Chad for safety while
others fled to closer camps within Darfur. Ishaq Haron, the head of the
Treguine refugee camp said, “When we initially fled Sudan, the first
people to take care of us were the Chadians.” With no international aid
agencies present during the first months of ethnic cleansing, he said
their kin on the Chadian side of the border offered them food, water,
and shelter when they had nowhere else to go.

East Chad may
have been better off than Darfur before the war, but only just, and the
influx of such a large refugee population put a serious strain on the
resource base of Chadians living in the region, and in their ability to
sustain themselves. The United Nations Development Project’s (UNDP)
2005 Human Development Report cites Chad as the fifth poorest country
in the world, and the eastern region of the country is one of its most
remote parts. Aside from the more fertile southern portion of the
border region, it is mostly barren and access to water is extremely
limited. According to the UNDP report, only two percent of Chadians
living in provinces bordering Sudan have access to safe drinking water.
Electricity, running water, and telephones are nonexistent outside the
provincial capitals, and even in cities their availability is sporadic.
People’s lives revolve around the collection and consumption of three
natural resources: water for drinking and farming, firewood for
cooking, and grass for grazing livestock, all of which are scarce.

The limitation of these natural resources has historically led to
conflicts in the region between mostly black sedentary agriculturalists
and Arab nomadic pastoralists. Desertification, which has brought about
periods of severe drought since the second half of the 20th century,
has pushed Arab tribes in Darfur into grazing their livestock on the
rich agricultural lands and pastures of the sedentary populations. With
the increased pressure of a degrading environment, cattle raids turned
into full-fledged conflicts. Then, when armed rebel groups, mostly
black Darfuris, rose up demanding that the Sudanese government end the
economic marginalization of their people, President Omar Al-Bashir took
advantage of these pre-existing conflicts by arming, financing, and
training certain elements of the Arab tribes and using them to target
the civilian populations from which these rebels were drawn.

After two million people flooded into camps in Darfur and over 200,000
took refuge in East Chad, the already frail environment quickly began
to degenerate. Ouri Cassoni, the largest and northernmost of Chad’s 12
refugee camps, is surrounded by nothing but sand and scant shrubbery.
The expanse of dusty tents and mud walls that house almost 30,000
people seems to be stuck randomly in the middle of the Chadian desert.
During a visit to the camp, UNHCR’s
environmental officer in Chad, Daniel Roger, said that the environment
cannot handle the concentration of so many people in one place. “There
are almost thirty thousand refugees in the camp, but no more than five
thousand local Chadians in the area,” he told me.

Water is in
short supply in northeastern Chad, said Roger, and “there is not enough
wood to support the population. The small amount of natural resources
[in East Chad] is being overexploited. These refugees also have basic
needs to satisfy. They are consuming much more than nature is
producing. It has created an imbalance.” This imbalance has pushed the
environment to the point of crisis, he said, and when environments
collapse, everything goes with them. In East Chad, the deterioration of
the environment has already put severe stress on the relations between
Chadians and the refugees and the more natural resources dwindle, the
greater the risk of conflict between refugees and locals becomes.
“[Chadians] have the impression that they are being invaded by these
people who came from Sudan,” said Roger. “The main problem is the
competition over the exploitation of resources, especially firewood and
water.”

This competition has led to instances of violent attacks
on refugees, and since women are traditionally the ones to collect wood
and water, the bulk of the violence has come down on them. Fatima Abu
Mohammed, 20-year-old mother of two whose name has been changed for her
protection, said that she and other women don’t feel free in the camps
and she is too afraid to collect wood anymore. Eyes cast down to the
sand floor of her shack, she told her story with reservation. “Six
months ago I was beaten by a group of men while I was searching for
wood. There were three of them and they had a gun. Then after they beat
me, they raped me.”

USAIDA refugee camp.

In Treguine, Haron spoke with poise and self-assurance when talking
about the atrocities he and his family were subjected to in Darfur, but
as soon as the topic changes to their current situation in the camp,
his voice cracked and his eyes began to luster. “In Sudan, the
Janjaweed would attack women, beat them, and rape them and here we deal
with the same thing.”

In an effort to increase the security of
women, protect the ecosystem from total collapse, and prevent a new
conflict from forming between Chadians and Sudanese refugees, efforts
have been made by international NGOs to relieve the strain on the
environment. UNHCR has dedicated five percent of its budget in Chad to
providing Chadian communities near the refugee camps with basic
services, especially water facilities. To reduce the rate of
deforestation, a new program has been set up at Ouri Cassoni to collect
deadwood from designated sites about 20 miles from the camp. Women are
taken by vehicles to collect the wood themselves, which is then brought
back to be rationed to the entire camp. The rations however, still fall
short of supplying the camps 30,000 people with their requirement of
less than two pounds of firewood each. In some of the northern camps
where deadwood is most scarce, fuel-efficient, enclosed clay stoves
have been built into people’s huts as an alternative to the less
efficient traditional three-stone fires and in Ouri Cassoni, people are
given small amounts of kerosene to supplement their firewood. Refugees
have also started to use small-scale kitchen gardens as a sustainable
alternative to extensive agriculture in the surrounding areas, using
wastewater from domestic activities.

Natural resources are still
diminishing quickly though, and it is only a matter of time before
competition erupts into inter-community conflict. Jessica Hyba, the
assistant country director of CARE, a British NGO working on environmental issues in Chad, thinks that the single factor
that will determine the stability of East Chad is the length of time
that refugees will be there. “In a couple of years’ time, should the
refugees still be here,” she said, “I would imagine that a lot of the
peace-building activities would probably be around the deadwood
collection.”

As the sun comes closer to the earth in Ouri Cassoni, I think back over
all of the conversations that I have had with refugees about what they
suffered in Darfur and the difficulties that they face today in exile.
The sky turns grayish yellow and the cone-shaped roofs become
silhouettes on the horizon while lone people walk along it, their loose
garments fluttering gently in the wind. I struggle to put all the
pieces together about Darfur. The conflict only grows in complexity as
it continues to expand, pulling Chad further into it. As the
environment erodes in East Chad, I wonder how much longer it will be
before a new conflict begins. The war in Darfur has sent out ripples of
calamity, producing new problems that seem disconnected from the first
genocidal intentions. Bombs have fallen on huts and rape used as a
weapon, millions have fled and still hope for immediate return, the
natural world is being killed, and people wait, hoping that East Chad
will be able to hold itself together through it all. In the end, the
solution to the looming environmental crisis is the same as that which
will stop the escalating conflict in Darfur: an end to the
marginalization of the people of Darfur and a just peace that will
allow people to return home, and once again spread out across the
delicate landscape.